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You earned Social Security, you paid for benefits 😳😩 Social Security is an entitlement 🙄

The fact is you earned your benefits by meeting eligibility requirements in the law. You did not pay for your benefits.

Many people who are collecting benefits paid nothing for them. Others through their and their employers taxes contributed to the Social Security trust, but that money paid for benefits of people in the previous generation and at one time excess tax revenue was put into the reserve. No more.

However, if everyone had actually paid for their benefits, the trust would not be running out of money and simply through interest would be growing, not declining to zero.

You are indeed entitled to Social Security, there is a 1935 federal law that says so. So entitlement is not a dirty word. But the taxes workers contribute and have contributed in recent years are insufficient to keep the program going as it currently exists. That is, pay 100% of promised benefits.

Taxes and other revenue are too low or benefits promised are too high. Take your pick.

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No, because it is an entitlement, because Congress can unilaterally and retroactively change the eligibility rules, neither you nor I nor anyone else “earned” the promised benefit. To truly earn something, there must be a contract, a duty.

It makes no difference if there was an individual account with your name on it where all of your contributions had been deposited, and where you perhaps had investment control.

Since there is NO contract, there is no requirement that you be paid anything, at anytime.

Well, non-lawyers can just as easily recognize the absence of a contract, formal written or oral.

You always argue reservation of rights clauses should be ignored when it comes to retiree medical. I am simply noting that there is no option for taxpayers or beneficiaries to enforce historical Congressional promises… even though they may have a specific SS benefit projection and even though you have commenced your benefit. Remember, your SS benefit projection now comes with a disclaimer regarding funding.

Just like long term care and Medicare, so long as the myth persists that benefits can be improved and that others should pay, Bernie and the idiots will continue to milk it for votes.

Just this week, there was an article in Marketwatch that ignored the Antideficiency and Social Security Act language to argue that benefits will just continue even after trust assets are exhausted – even if Congress fails to act to raise taxes.

We need people to understand the whole story … else we’ll continue to have what we have today.

Of course you are right, but historically it’s all been ignored and things go on. Only in the private sector have people learned the hard way what is forever and what is not, except maybe the tax code. The best assurance citizens have is that politicians want to get votes. At the same time that is our greatest risk. When I say SS will be there in some manner, I am not talking contracts, but politics. But what people believe that is not true, like there is a surplus, is quite scary.